Teachers need to be aware that there are differences among their learners, even if they are not noticeable at first glance. These differences should be identified and taken into consideration both in planning and in delivery of lessons. Teaching literature is no exception. The so-called new task phase provides teachers with many opportunities for differentiation. Whether teachers make use of it and how appropriate the tasks are depends on their views on the importance of teaching differentiation, their qualifications, the methods of differentiation, etc. The aim of this research was to establish how teachers assess the importance of differentiation in reading tasks, how they assess their own competence to deliver it, how often they deliver it, for whom they deliver it, what they take into consideration and in what ways they adapt the tasks, how many tasks they offer to their learners, how often they include differentiated tasks in their lesson plans and whether they achieve the same educational objective with them. Our goal was also to establish which differences occur between teachers of different seniority in their assessment of the importance of delivering differentiated tasks, and in their qualifications and frequency of delivery of differentiated reading tasks. The empirical part of this thesis presents the results gathered through an online questionnaire and the analysis of lesson plans. Our sample consisted of class teachers who were teaching in the second trimester of Slovenian primary schools in the school year 2020/21 and teachers who were teaching Slovene in grade 6 of primary school in the same school year. 141 teachers responded to the online questionnaire and 74 teachers submitted one lesson plan each.
Following the results of the online questionnaires, we found that on a 5-point scale, where a score of one means very poor and a score of five means excellent, teachers on average rate their qualification to differentiate reading tasks in teaching literature at a score of three, which means good. On average, teachers with the longest seniority rate their qualification to differentiate reading tasks highest, while teachers with the shortest seniority rate their qualification lowest. Most teachers differentiate reading tasks by adjusting the level of difficulty according to Bloom's taxonomy, and most of them take into consideration the development of language, reading and literary perception and the horizon of expectation. We also established that the highest proportion of teachers differentiate reading tasks for learners with special educational needs. Most of the teachers responded that they include differentiated tasks in their lesson plans. Through the online questionnaire and the analysis of lesson plans, we found that most teachers use differentiated tasks to achieve the same educational objective. The average number of differentiated tasks in the analysed lesson plans was 3.36.
Recommendations have been formulated to help teachers in creating appropriate differentiated reading tasks. We have also compiled samples of differentiated tasks which, based on the criteria selected, we have determined to be appropriate
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